Commanding.

Diabolical is the only word that will come at all near fitly
characterizing such an infamous order. What must have been the nature of
a man who would calmly order twenty-five guns to be opened with grape and
canister at two hundred yards range, upon a mass of thirty thousand
prisoners, mostly sick and dying! All this, rather than suffer them to
be rescued by their friends. Can there be any terms of reprobation
sufficiently strong to properly denounce so malignant a monster? History
has no parallel to him, save among the blood-reveling kings of Dahomey,
or those sanguinary Asiatic chieftains who built pyramids of human
skulls, and paved roads with men's bones. How a man bred an American
came to display such a Timour-like thirst for human life, such an
Oriental contempt for the sufferings of others, is one of the mysteries
that perplexes me the more I study it.

If the Rebel leaders who appointed this man, to whom he reported direct,
without intervention of superior officers, and who were fully informed of
all his acts through other sources than himself, were not responsible for
him, who in Heaven's name was? How can there be a possibility that they
were not cognizant and approving of his acts?

The Rebels have attempted but one defense to the terrible charges against
them, and that is, that our Government persistently refused to exchange,
preferring to let its men rot in prison, to yielding up the Rebels it
held. This is so utterly false as to be absurd. Our Government made
overture after overture for exchange to the Rebels, and offered to yield
many of the points of difference. But it could not, with the least
consideration for its own honor, yield up the negro soldiers and their
officers to the unrestrained brutality of the Rebel authorities, nor
could it, consistent with military prudence, parole the one hundred
thousand well-fed, well-clothed, able-bodied Rebels held by it as
prisoners, and let them appear inside of a week in front of Grant or
Sherman. Until it would agree to do this the Rebels would not agree to
exchange, and the only motive--save revenge--which could have inspired
the Rebel maltreatment of the prisoners, was the expectation of raising
such a clamor in the North as would force the Government to consent to a
disadvantageous exchange, and to give back to the Confederacy, at its
most critical period one hundred thousand fresh, able-bodied soldiers.
It was for this purpose, pr